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All Rise...

One bowl of Appellate Judge Mike Pinsky has more fiber than 30,000 bowls of your breakfast cereal.

The Charge

"And I love that it's all natural! Except for the crack cocaine
part."—Kelly Ripa

The Case

Back when I was in college, I knew a very beautiful woman who was desired by
all my friends. After our evening class, we would all go out to a bar together,
and whenever she would get up from the table, we guys would talk about her
constantly. But none of us would ask her out. She had a boyfriend, but that
wasn't the reason we didn't hit on her. It was the fact that her boyfriend
fancied himself a comedy writer, and his dream was to be a writer on Saturday
Night Live. We figured that, if she continued to date this guy, she
obviously didn't have any taste and probably wasn't very bright.

Steve Martin said it best, folks. Comedy is not pretty. To wit: Saturday
Night Live. Sure, it is a television institution. Sure, there have been some
memorable moments and a handful of classic comedy bits. Sure, there have
been some talented comedy writers on the show, like Al Franken and Tina Fey. But
these morsels have been few and far between. The same for performers. For every
John Belushi (whose talent was, to be honest, more in his unharnessed potential
than in the actual execution of material), there have been half a dozen Jim
Belushis. Never has so much comedy talent—funneled from the fantastic
training grounds like Second City and the Groundlings—been sanded down and
homogenized to remove any threatening edges.

To be fair, having to produce over an hour of new material every week (after
you remove musical spots and commercials) is tough. SNL has tried to keep
up in two ways: the use of recurring characters that might have been amusing one
time but keep getting more annoying as the premise stretches too thin
("Makin' copies!") and dragging out sketches like medieval torture
victims on the rack.

Logically then, the best showcase for SNL material should be the
stuff that doesn't rely on those lazy tricks. Fake commercials and advertising
parodies are short, focused, and resist repetitive gags. And since they are
filmed ahead of time, they can be rehearsed, timed, and edited to maximize the
performers' strengths, especially for those comedians who need an enclosed
environment (as opposed to a live studio).

Saturday Night Live: The Best of Commercial Parodies starts off right
away with three funny bits, commercials for a back-tattoo removal medicine, an
adult diaper, and a shampoo with crack. So, in short, why are these funny? The
first ad, starring show regulars, mocks the aging Gen Xers who make up
SNL's core audience in a concentrated package. The other two ads are even
funnier, because they do not feature SNL regulars at all. Getting
the real Kelly Ripa to make fun of her own chipper television persona is an
unexpected treat. Few SNL regulars (Phil Hartman for example) can muster
the earnestness of real commercials; they often seem to be winking to the
audience. Queen Latifa selling medicine for racial tension headaches. Ben
Affleck tearing up a Thai hotel room ("You're being selfish! You don't need
both your kidneys!"). Sam Waterston selling anti-robot insurance.
Alec Baldwin in pretty much anything. This stuff is funny. (Feel free to skip
Jessica Simpson advertising Chicken of the Sea though.)

A surprising number of these advertisements base their humor around bodily
functions. From "Oops, I Crapped My Pants" to the "Love
Toilet" to the Dyson Vacuum toilet to feminine napkins made from chunky
wood pulp to a "Magic Mouth" that turns your farts into speech. If it
happens below the waist, you will hear about it again and again. Some are funny
("Kotex Classic" sends up retro fashion trends as well as getting
yucks from a bodily function) and some are not (the host segments, in which Will
Ferrell tries to read for a tampon ad), but overall, they suggest a tendency on
the part of SNL writers to fall back on poop jokes. It reminds me of the
moment when the writers discovered they could say "penis" on the
air—and wrote a sketch in which everyone stood around and just said
"penis" for an interminable length of time. If you are a
seventh-grader, you'll laugh. Grown-ups will find it tiresome.

Best of Commercial Parodies was originally compiled as a prime time
special, featuring over 80 minutes of gags laid out in apparently random order.
(There was also an earlier television special, from about 15 years ago, that
contained slightly different content—which should have been included here
as an extra feature.) The material stretches from classics like Dan Aykroyd
charging through a Bassomatic demonstration (a parody of Ron Popeil that will
probably be lost on your kids) to more recent parodies like Woomba (a vacuum
cleaner for "your lady business"). Will Farrell shows why SNL
sketch material sucks by stretching a bit about invading a Madison Avenue firm
way too long. But the commercials themselves? I have to say, many of them were
actually funnier on second viewing than on the first. And with four dozen
shorts—plus ten more as the only extra content on the disc—the duds
blow by quickly.

Rarely do the sketches take real risks, and there were times where I thought
to myself, "Wow, Bob and David would have gone farther with that bit"
or "They should have cast an unknown in that part instead of a smirking
show regular." On the other hand, you will enjoy appearances by your
favorite past cast members (Eddie Murphy as Buckwheat, or John Belushi enjoying
Little Chocolate Donuts breakfast cereal with a cigarette dangling in his
fingers). You may miss a few favorites from the old days in this show, cut in
favor of bits from the last few years, but remember that Lorne Michaels has
another whole disc worth of worthy mock ads (where's Steve Martin's Penis Beauty
Cream and Mel's Char Palace, where Dan Aykroyd tells restaurant patrons that
they get to stun and chainsaw their own beefsteaks?) waiting in the wings for a
second volume.

Of course, with four dozen shorts, Best of Commercial Parodies gets a
little exhausting, and by the halfway point, you will find yourself wanting a
break. But overall, this disc may be one of the better compilations of
Saturday Night Live material. If the rest of the show were this
consistently good, it wouldn't be so embarrassing to want to be an SNL
writer.

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